The delivery of video content generally offers a much richer user experience than static images and text. For example, a user who desires to catch up on the daily news may prefer to watch a video of a news broadcast on their mobile phone rather than to read a transcript of the news. Accordingly, the efficient and reliable delivery of video content is critical to creating a rich user experience. Since video content generally requires more memory and network bandwidth than other data types, delivering video content over networks, such as the Internet and wireless networks, may present challenges such as efficiency, reliability, and network capacity.
To promote efficient delivery, video content is typically encoded prior to delivery to reduce the amount of data actually being transferred over the network. One common type of video compression is a motion-compensation-based video coding scheme, which is used in such coding standards as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.261, H.263, and H.264/AVC. In such coding standards, video images are sampled and transformed into coefficients that capture the variation in pixels across the image. The coefficients are then quantized and transmitted to a decoder. The decoder is able to decode the image by performing operations that are substantially the inverse of the encoding operations.
While current video coding techniques promote efficient delivery video content, such techniques may contain redundancy.